Booties, booty

I knit a pair of the ever-popular Saartje's Booties to go with that cute green and white baby leaf hat I designed a few months ago.

















They're quick and easy (may they be a harbinger for my labor), though I would have preferred stockinette booties to garter ones. Ysolda Teague's Tiny Shoes is a great stockinette bootie pattern, but I knit about half a bootie using Tiny Shoes before I concluded that the pattern definitely doesn't work in cotton - there needs to be more elasticity and around the top than cotton allows.

Knitting for the incoming baby is now officially finished, and probably this is a good thing since I am just starting my 39th week and the baby has obviously dropped.

Midwife: (poking at knitcrit's cervix) Hmmm...whoa - that head is REALLY low. Don' t you feel like you're sitting on a bowling ball?

Knitcrit: Not really. (Feeling profoundly un-earth-motherly) Maybe I'm not very in touch with my body...

Midwife: Or it could just mean you have a good, wide, open pelvis.

Knitcrit: That would be nice.

Midwife: And (poke, poke) you are really effaced. No dilation yet, but the cervix feels really thin. The baby's head is right there.

Knitcrit. Huh. Okay. But I'm not going to go early, am I?

Midwife: Well, I wouldn't expect a call from you this weekend, but if you start to dilate at all over the next day or so...(tapers off in meaningful way)

Noooooo. I do NOT want to have the baby early. I really, really don't. I feel absolutely fine and there's still lots of summer fun to be had before the official due date arrives on the 23rd. Yesterday, after the visit to the midwives, Todd and I went into full panic mode and made a beeline to Island Beach just to be sure we saw the ocean at least once this summer.

As you can see, the baby has definitely dropped:

















Now that I think about it, I guess I can tell the baby is sitting really low when I do yoga - the primary series of Astanga is largely designed to open the pelvis and the hips, and lately, when I do Astanga, I feel that my pelvis is very open and yet also very full of something. Which turns out to be baby head.

I keep meaning to do a post of my observations about being visibly pregnant in NYC, but now that I am apparently ready to drop I am thinking the best use of my remaining time might be getting baby shower thank you notes written.

We're not fully moved in yet, but the apartment is definitely functional. Look at tiny Saarje's booties in mammoth new apartment:






















In the old apartment the booties would have filled half the living room.

Karma: Not Always a Bitch

We're still moving into the new place - today I mounted the shelving for spices and I am not sure what made me happier - using power tools at 9 months pregnant or the fact that for possibly the first time in my adult life, getting spices will not involve one or more of the following:

1. Reaching into back of dark, overcrowded cabinet while trying not to disturb living or dead cockroaches and also hoping that this will be the time that I will put my hand on the Turmeric. Which it is not.

2. Looking at tightly packed sea of identical spice jar tops wedged in small ugly white shelving unit and wondering whether or not that's the Cinnamon way in the back and then wondering whether or not I can extract the possibly-Cinnamon without precipitating avalanche of spices onto kitchen floor and then, after the crashing and rolling of jars has subsided, wondering why I always think that I can extract a single jar from the small ugly white shelf without precipitating an avalanche of spices. And it wasn't the Cinnamon.

3. In an effort to avoid the dark, overcrowded cabinet cockroach random grab (tm), removing every single last thing from the dark, overcrowded cabinet only to discover that the Cardamom must be in the small ugly white shelving unit.

Behold the dawn of a new era:























And there's three more just like these on the other side of the stove area. And the spices are alphabetized.

But I digress, if in fact one can lead with a digression. This is supposed to be a post about karma, and the ghosts of knits past. Early on in the revival of my interest in knitting - so I think we're talking about 9-ish years ago - I completed my first ever baby sweater for my Aunt's firstborn (though she's technically my aunt, she's actually only about 6 years older than I am. Whoops! Surprise!). Perhaps two years later I completed a baby blanket for her second. And now, years later, at my baby shower last Saturday, I opened a package from my aunt and was delighted to see that my efforts had been none too shabby, if I do say so myself:


















Not the most exciting sweater pattern, but it's a pretty color, unisex, and classic, and the buttons are just adorable. They're ceramic, handmade, and the kitty stripes match the yarn perfectly.

















And the blanket:


















































Again, feather-and-fan is not exactly groundbreaking baby blanket material, but the yarn I chose - it seems to be an extremely soft cotton-something blend with beautiful drape - pushes the blanket into above-average status, I think. So I guess my baby won't have to wait until I finish the alpaca blanket in October to have a hand knit blanket from its mother.

I was going to put the blanket and sweater in the newly repurposed Ikea kitchen unit (old purpose: providing counterspace and holding pots and pans; new purpose: changing table and baby clothing/linen storage), but I randomly smelled them to see if they were musty and as it turns out, because, I guess, until very recently my Aunt and her family lived in my grandparents' house, the blanket and sweater smell like my grandparents' place, and particularly, somehow, my grandparent's place from 30 years ago. Hormones must be making me uncharacteristically sentimental because I decided that I didn't want that smell to go away, and so I put the knits in a plastic bag for the time being.

My aunt also made a card that features a picture of me from about 30 years ago. I don't know if I'm proud or worried that at age 7 I looked this unthrilled with and clueless about being a mother, but in any case I think the picture is hilarious.






















Personally, I would have captioned this picture "What am I supposed to do with this thing?" but I guess my aunt wanted to be encouraging.

This picture was clearly taken before La Leche League had firebombed all Chinese factories that dared to accessorize plastic baby dolls with bottles (so my 7-year-old self can't be blamed for not breastfeeding), but shouldn't we perhaps be more concerned that my 7-year-old self seems to think that proper baby care includes depriving the child of clothes and human contact?

Keys to the Kingdom

These?

















These would be the keys to our new apartment. Our new apartment that is twice as big as our current apartment. Our new apartment with laundry in the building. Our new apartment that is located in our current beloved neighborhood. Yes.

Now all it needs to do is pass the $325 bedbug sniffing beagle test before we move in. The apartment checked out fine on the bedbug registry, but in this case, an ounce of prevention is worth about a million tons of cure. Landlords are legally obligated to pay for bedbug extermination, so on the off chance that - god forbid - the apartment is infested, at least we'll have some legal protection and some time to kill the bastards before we move in. And by "bastards" I of course mean the bedbugs, not the landlord or the realtor or anything like that.

But the main thing is, we have the keys. The story of how we got them will have to wait until I have recovered from the process of getting them, but believe me, it's a fine tale, and exceptional even by New York real estate standards.

Justice, New York Real Estate Style

Todd and I have been looking for a slightly more baby-friendly apartment - our tiny 4th floor walkup without laundry in the building has served us well, and if we had to, we could make it work with a baby, but it seems that because of the recession the Manhattan real estate market has actually been taken down a bit, with the upshot being we can probably afford a bigger place with elevator and laundry in a desirable neighborhood for about what we are paying now.

Suburban readers of this blog are probably still reeling at the thought of no laundry in the home, much less in the building. To this mind-boggling concept I will add that searching for an apartment in Manhattan also involves checking potential buildings at this highly informative website:

http://bedbugregistry.com/

Bedbugs. Oh, yes. They are coming back and they are taking over Manhattan. Part of the reason for the comeback is at this point, the only pesticides that will consistently kill them are illegal (officially, anyway) in the United States. Bedbugs don't spread disease, but they are gross and their bites itch. And I know this because I have lived with them in India. Many of them, actually.

So far, Todd and I have escaped the plague, though one of my colleagues at work was not so lucky, and this became a source of concern because my office is next door to his office. My office mates and I went in on a - I kid you not - bedbug sniffing beagle to sweep our offices for potential contamination:

http://www.acexterminating.com/

The beagle gave us the all-clear and has subsequently cleared my colleague's office, too. Beagles are apparently 98% accurate when properly trained. So far, so good.

Anyway, the point is, we've been looking for a bedbug-free two bedroom for about two weeks now and have possibly come up with a good situation, but we won't know if we have it until after the long weekend. There have been some tragedies along the way which are still too fresh to be funny, much less blog fodder, but this I can report:

We were chatting with a realtor who told us something that we had already heard from another realtor, namely, that the Coldwell Banker group was going under. Mostly I think that real estate agents in New York City are bloodsucking bedbugs in human form whose "profession" consists largely of collecting upwards of $2,000 to $4,000 (or more) to unlock doors of vacant apartments and then stand around looking at potential renters/buyers like they are taking too long. So my sympathy for Coldwell Baker employees is limited.

Anyway, this realtor, who worked for Coldwell Banker, mentioned that the current theory among employees as to why Coldwell Banker is shutting down is as follows: at the height of the real estate boom in NYC about three years ago, Coldwell Banker rented a very, very expensive set of office suites somewhere in midtown. Now that the market has crashed and rentals and sales are not bringing in as much revenue, the rent for the office suites - which Coldwell Banker is locked into by the terms of its lease - far exceeds the revenue that the company is bringing in.

Which means, as alert readers may have already deduced, that Coldwell Banker, a real estate company, is going out of business because it made stupid decisions about the real estate that it chose for its headquarters. Which is a rare instance of deeply satisfying poetic justice in my book, almost making the past two weeks of apartment seeking stress worth it.

Benny the not entirely super Super

Benny is the superintendent for our building. As supers go, Benny is okay, especially given the fact that we're in a rent stabilized apartment, which often means that the landlord has given the super explicit instructions to ignore any tenant request that does not have the word "fire" in it. He's quick with disaster management (e.g. sudden torrential ceiling leaks, of which we've had three), and over the three years that we've been in the building, he's really developed his amateur general contractor skills, most notably during the epic re-painting of the entire common space of the apartment building, which involved smashing what we affectionately referred to as the "barf-tastic" stucco finish on the walls, hanging sheet rock, and painting over the entire new surface in what Benny said was "linen white" color paint. Benny is originally from Puerto Rico and even though he's clearly in his late 50's and has a bit of a beer belly, he still strikes me as the kind of man who could really take care of himself in a fist fight, which is why, in one of my brief conversations with him about the building renovations, I was charmed by both the fact that he bothered to note the official shade of white he was using and his pronunciation of it: "leeenaan whayt."

Our downstairs neighbors have had a problem with a very slow leak in their bathroom ceiling and because there is a proportional relationship between the level of threat and the speed of response, it took Benny a while to address the issue. I was pretty sure that because our bathtub has a hole in the tilework right where the cold water faucet comes out of the wall, water from our showering was dripping down to the space underneath our bathtub - to our neighbor's bathroom ceiling, in other words. Sometimes when I get in the shower I honestly think to myself that this could be the time that the weight of my body causes the rotted-out wooden floorboards underneath the bathtub to give way, causing the entire bathtub to fall through the ceiling into our downstairs neighbor's bathroom. In fact, several months ago Todd drew a line on the wall to chart any new sinking of the bathroom floor.

Benny stopped by a few days ago to address the issue of our neighbor's ceiling leak. Noting the hole in the tile, he did what he had actually done a few months ago when he stopped by our apartment to fix an unrelated bathroom problem: He stuffed toilet paper in the hole. Oh, yes.























To be fair, I think this time he mixed some caulk in with the toilet paper. I can't really tell and I don't want to poke it because I'm afraid of pushing it into the hole. We'll just have to wait and see if the seal dissolves after a few showers.